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Talk:Ben 10 vs Hal Jordan/@comment-5035900-20190531062937
Let me just start with the facts that yes, Death Battle is not perfect, yes, it could be written better, yes, they can do more with every episode, and absolutely, it is perfectly reasonable to ask for them to make a better product: But what must be understood is that they have finite resources to make these and it all takes tremendous amounts of effort to do. If one were to ask "Why didn't they have 10 or 15 more aliens in the fight", the answer is simple: they had to be drawn by hand and even so much as making them lean a little to the right takes time to create. And that's not even going into the backgrounds and having them simulate fluid movement and fighting. Remember when Ben himself had to animate the first 19 episodes himself? Yes, you can make the observation that compared to the 2D animators later on, they were low-quality, but even that took time to do. He had to learn how to animate basically on the fly and the fact he even managed to get the episodes to look as well as they did is a testament to how hard he worked on them. From personal experience, just trying to go frame-by-frame for several seconds and make it look fluid took hours to do. And that's the same deal the current animators have, as well as the added workload of having to draw most of them. I'd like to think they weren't rushed or overworked and made everything at their own pace. And part of it is thanks to the script, which didn't require every single alien Ben ever used. You could be a master artist and animator, but would you want someone telling you "You've made five aliens. Now go make a hundred more of them." And unless you've got a year in advance, I highly doubt you're going to like being told to do that on a short time frame. In fact, it's the script-writer accounting for the animators to begin with why we don't see 30 minute long fights with every single ability ever single combatant has ever used: that's too much. Script-writers know the workload their animators have and they try to make the fight reasonable for them to work on. Ideally, if you had all the time and money in the world and/or could create animation with your thoughts, sure, you'd be happy to make them as long and as with as much stuff as you could think of, but that's not how any of this works: animation takes time and effort, far more so than someone simply writing it. And this brings me to something I've seen for several years: this idea that something written by fans who do this for fun with no deadline and no animation required is somehow better than what Death Battle puts out. It is a disservice to not just Death Battle's writers, but to the animators who put their sweat and tears into their fight animations. When you write a fanon battle, we don't have to worry about any of that: we just imagine it in our heads, as big and expansive as we want, and put it up to be read so readers can picture it in their heads as well. For animators, they have to create all of it. Every single frame. And they have to work with budgets, time frames, and deadlines. And things can go wrong. A computer can go down. Work can be lost. It's not clicking a button and poof, a fight is made. Before I conclude, I'd like to say once again that it's entirely reasonable to ask for a better product. Unlike the petty "this isn't the outcome I wanted!" grovel we get for every outcome of every episode, wanting Death Battle to be better written and to do more with their fights is all valid, worth them listening to, and is in the service of making the show the best it can be... but to say their work is inferior compared to the writings of a fan contributes absolutely nothing to the discourse and only undermines the amount of time, effort, and blood its creators, writers, and animators put into making Death Battle. And I think it's well past time we consider it from their perspective for once.